Bazaar / Bizarre –“The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter—it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” Mark Twain
Check this category every week for a new set of ceaselessly confused, misused or misspelled words to master. Break the cycle of language abuse!
Another favorite!
I discovered long ago that many people have no idea that these are two separate words. It seems that they just latch on to one spelling or the other and then just use it for both meanings.
Newsflash, Friends! They are crazy different!! Sure, they’re pronounced the same, but that’s where any and all similarity ends.
A bazaar is a marketplace where merchants and vendors gather, set up tables and booths and sell their wares. A flea market, a farmers’ market, a craft show, a vendor event, a carnival or any other opportunity for many merchants to converge on one place to sell stuff qualifies as a bazaar.
Church bazaars are common and usually exist as fund raisers for charity. Handmade items, baked goods, entertainment, sometimes even carnival rides pop up to attract customers and raise money for good causes. Country fairs fit into the category, too.
Common stuff. Nothing odd here.
But if something is bizarre, it’s a different story entirely!
Anything that’s strange, odd, unconventional, weird, unexpected, peculiar, eccentric, off-the wall, abnormal, irregular, unorthodox, crazy, insane, wacky, unimaginable or out there is bizarre.
So, the two words are pretty different. Grammatically, bazaar is a noun because it’s a thing or a place and bizarre is an adjective because it is not a thing but it is a descriptor of things.
And, phonetically, I suppose, the words should be pronounced differently because of their spelling. Buh-zaar for bazaar and Bi-zarre for bizarre, but they mostly come out sounding exactly the same which could account for why people think there’s only one word.
But there are, indeed, two
Your Turn
- Write about the last bazaar (or fair) that you attended or that you remember. Describe the vendors, the rides, the games, the food, the smells, the crowd or anything else that sticks in your memory. I remember church bazaars when I was a teenager being gathering places where we could socialize without our parents hovering over us. So if I were writing about this topic, I’d probably start there.
You do you.
- If you’re paying attention, bizarre things happen all the time. Things that seem off. Things that we can’t make sense of. Things that veer away from the everyday. Things that don’t seem to fit.
Zero in on a bizarre occurrence in your life. Someone’s baffling behavior. An argument that broke out unexpectedly. An unpredictable or unseasonable weather event. A confrontation with a wild animal. A weird dream. An off-the-wall movie. A feeling that you can’t explain.
If you can’t recall a real-life bizarre experience, make one up.
Answers for Dissembling / Disassembling Page
- The identical twins were a dissembling pair, one often pretending to be the other.
- The auto shop kids disassembled the principal’s entire VW bug in the parking lot before the substitute realized what they were doing.
- The crafty squirrel disassembled the door mechanism of the bird feeder and dumped all the seen onto the lawn.
- As it turns out, Dr. Witherspoon wasn’t a doctor at all. He dissembled his way into a job without ever going to medical school.
- In the film Catch Me If You Can, Leonardo di Caprio plays a dissembling con man who cashes millions of dollars of bad checks and pretends to be a doctor, a lawyer and an airline pilot.
- You dissembling little dissembler! Instead of mowing the lawn, you disassembled the lawn mower!
- In preparation for the new furniture delivery, he disassembled the sofa and end tables and put it all out on the curb in a pile for the heavy pickup truck. Then he disassembled the kitchen table and chairs and put all that out. Finally, he disassembled the bedroom set and hauled all of those pieces out to the street. His wife, who was away visiting friends, called him and said, “Surprise! The new furniture came today while you were at work. My mom let them in. Isn’t it great? They hauled away all the old stuff at no extra charge! How does it look?”